Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light is a timely exhibition of predominantly new works by artist Benjamin Sebastian (1980 AUS/UK) – consisting of digital collage and textiles, soft sculpture and installation, as well as performance art documentation & relics. Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light is Sebastian’s largest solo presentation in the UK to date and traces their development as a collage, assemblage, installation & performance artist, sculptor and craftsperson – while foregrounding their current engagement with decoloniality; unpacking their settler heritages, neurodiversity and nonbinary identity.
Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light is not intended to make sense, yet rather as a process of sense-making – where hybrid identities, iconoclastic gestures, patchwork (visual) languages and amorphously gendered entities diffuse settled narratives – opening up spaces of unknowing, encouraging moments of contemplation, critical reflection and visioning in relation to the interconnected complexities of our contemporary, social and political landscapes.
Can you tell us about the process of making your work?
My process is highly intuitive, underpinned as much by speculation as research, and very much studio & residency-led. I seek out and/or create suitable spaces that enable an immersion in the imaginaries of the yet-to-be objects, environments and actions I wish to construct. I experience the making of art as an act of (practical) magic. The parallels between artistic and occult practices are obvious to me, and I am fascinated by the potential of those practices in creating something from nothing – of drawing that which is yet to exist, into the physical/material world. I understand such parallels as explicit links between not only occult & artistic workings, yet also neurodivergent and queer(ed) experiences & actioning of life. All are processes of manifesting something-not-yet-here/known. Ultimately, I am engaged in a process of sense-making, attempting to better understand the systems and structures around me, in order to articulate and critique my position within them.
How would you define your work in a few words (ideally in 3 words)?
Esoteric, Transdisciplinary and Assemblage.
Could you share with us some insights on your artwork ‘Taut’ (2024)? Is there any particular story behind this new work?
I created ‘Taut’ quite recently and specifically to include in an upcoming touring exhibition of my work (Benjamin Sebastian: Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light). It is one in a series of seven sewn assemblage works that incorporate printed digital collage, calico and reconstituted nylon (Australian) flag pieces. The digital collage includes two zoomorphic figures. Each (human) figure has the head of a crow (one Carrion; European and the other Torresian; Australian). They each hold one hand of the other while stepping apart, their bodies stretching in opposite directions across calico (organic) and nylon (synthetic) respectively. ‘Taut’ alludes to tension, hybridity and something of the mythic. I imagined this work – along with the other six in the series – as a commentary on the complexities of postcolonial narratives and subjectivities, specifically relating to the British colonisation of Australia. There is also a good dose of homo-eroticism in these works which I intended to gesture towards the interrelated power dynamics at play between both settler colonialism and state sanctioned, compulsory heterosexuality & normative gender expression, upon the bodies & spirits of queer people in a (post)colonial context.
Your upcoming touring exhibition ‘Benjamin Sebastian: Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ will launch at Herbert Read Gallery in Canterbury. What kind of artworks will you be showing there?
‘Benjamin Sebastian: Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ was commissioned by Arts Council England as a touring exhibition intended to position some of my older works alongside new pieces created specifically for this show. The new objects are all sewn, textile collage, soft sculpture & installation works, made from various materials. The older works include photo & video documentation (shout out to my incredible collaborators and friends Marco Berardi and Baiba Sprance) of performance art works, a wearable sculpture from a previous performance at the I.C.A. (London), as well as sewn paper and digital photographic collages. Central to the exhibition is a new installation consisting of a large (3m²), fragmented, seven pointed star encircled by three human sized soft sculptural ‘entities’. The diamond fragments of the star incorporate; gold leaf, and sewn digital collage, printed and stitched and fixed onto calico, while the soft sculptural ‘entities’ have been sewn from a patchwork fabric I created using my mothers discarded clothes. Other materials incorporated into the works include; personal family photographs, archival aquatints, and a repeating pattern created from a Royal Mail postal sticker featuring the bust of Britain’s previous monarch (Elizabeth II).
Could you tell us about material selection for your artworks? It looks like you put a great emphasis on the combination of various materials.
I’m a collage and assemblage artist at heart, and yes, as noted I can be quite fastidious about the selection of, and relationship between, the materials I incorporate in a work. Whether found/reclaimed materials, gold (leaf), calico, archival aquatints, souvenir nylon flag pieces, or my mothers discarded clothes; the materials all have symbolisms and histories of their own, that create unique resonances and enter into dialogue with each other when configured in certain ways. For instance, working with calico in proximity to reconstituted nylon flag pieces and gold (leaf), is a subtle way for me to directly reference my familial links to the (once global) cotton milling centre of Oldham, England, while also gesturing towards the British Empire’s colonial impact in various parts of the world, such as the previous colonial rule of Calicut (now Kerala) in India, where calico originated, as well as in Australia (my place of birth), where the British (among others) pillaged natural resources such as gold during the ‘Gold Rushes’ of the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. The proximity of natural and synthetic fibres – as well as the whiteness of some of the nylon – becomes even more interesting to me when considering the fact that my English Grandfather emigrated to Australia under the ‘Assisted Migration Scheme’ – one of the Nation-Colony’s flagrant racist; ‘Populate or Perish’ policies – which encouraged (white) British people to; “Help Us Build A White Australia.”, at the end of the Second World War.
Are specific artworks you make created by random experiments in your studio, or do you usually come up with a particular concept or narrative in the very beginning of your artistic process?
It’s a combination of these two positions for me. Quite often I will experience a very clear, defined vision – in which case I will set about drawing that exact thing into the material world. In such an instance I will usually have an explicit understanding of the particular materials with which I will work and the ultimate form that the object (action, text, environment etc) will take. On the other hand – which has been the case with much of the new works I am currently creating – sometimes I have nothing other than a feeling that I will begin to unfold in the studio, following an intuitive asexploration of processes and materials until something starts to present itself before me. I adore both processes. I liken the prior to a practical and intellectual wrestling, or problem solving process primarily with materials, that is very much of me and my ego somehow – whereas I experience the latter more as a process of attunement and listening, perhaps more akin to channelling, where there is something other than simply myself at work. I experience the synthesis of these two process as a neurodiverse methodology, which I have come to understand as a profound, intellectual and extrasensory gift.
What about where you work? What’s your studio space like?
Currently I work from VSSL Studio in Deptford which is a small purpose built gallery space that I run with a few other artist-curators (another shout out to some more creative kin; Mine Kaplangı, Ash McNaughton & Joseph Morgan Schofield). VSSL operates as a timeshare between our performance/visual art studio practices and exhibitions of our curatorial projects. When the space is not open to the public with exhibitions – it’s a studio. So, currently, it looks like the inside of my mind, projected outward onto the walls, floor and tables of the space. I am very lucky (and hard working!) to have been able to secure access to such a great space, that is also constellated by incredibly creative, culturally savvy and kind collaborators.
What are your plans for the near future?
I am quite busy until the Spring of 2025 with the exhibition tour of ‘Benjamin Sebastian: Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’, as well as the facilitation of ‘Archipelagos: Visions in Orbit’, an exhibition I have co-curated at Whitechapel Gallery in London. I will also be contributing to an upcoming publication & cultural programme celebrating the life’s work (to date) of infamous Mexican performance artist; Rocío Boliver – in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency. Alongside these activities I will also be delivering various offerings (exhibitions, performances, publications) from both of my curatorial projects; ]performance s p a c e [ and VSSL Studio. Beyond all of that, I will be working away in the studio on some more soft sculpture/textile and performance art works – and would like to spend some time in either Australia or Colombia visiting family with my fiancé, Matteo Cortés (who has supported me with some aspects of exhibition design for the upcoming show in Canterbury), as soon as we get the chance. You can keep track of what I’m up to by joining my mailing list, checking the ‘News’ page on my website and by following me on instagram.
“Benjamin Sebastian: Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light – is a touring exhibition, with an inaugural exhibition run at Herbert Read Gallery (Canterbury) from the 12th of September through until 19th of October 2024.”
About Benjamin Sebastian:
Benjamin Sebastian (1980 AUS/UK) is a trans-disciplinary visual artist and curator living in London (UK). Their work spans performance, sculpture, curation, video, text, installation, drawing & new media – rooted in processes of bricolage, assemblage, collage, ritual & DIY cultural production. Through harmonizing nonbinary perspectives, neurodivergent cognition and decolonial practice, Sebastian weaves nascent narratives into existence, offering alternative ways of remembering, being here-and-now, and charting pathways to futures yet formed.
They hold a BA Fine Art HONS (1st Class) from the University of Lincoln and MA Curating Art and Public Programmes through Whitechapel Gallery. Sebastian’s continued research interests include; artificial/synthetic intelligence, occult practices, queer ecologies, decolonialism, transhumanism, contemporary performance & visual art. Sebastian is a founding director of both ]performance s p a c e [ and VSSL Studio and their affiliated projects have received funding from Arts Council England, the British Council, Greater London Authority, Creative Folkestone, Kent County Council, Inspire Lewisham, Roger De Haan Charitable Trust and Live Art U.K. as well as other charities and local authorities.
Some of their most recent activities include: curating ‘Archipelago: Visions in Orbit’ at Whitechapel Gallery, performance of ‘Holding The Shadow While Calling Back The Light’ as part of Pretty Doomed at Ugly Duck (2023), exhibition of ‘Benjamin Sebastian + Alicia Radage’ at VSSL Studio (2023) curating ‘FACET’ at VSSL Studio (2023), guest curating the ‘Intersect series’ at the Live Art Development Agency (2023), speaking on the symposium; ‘Art, Memory & Place’ at Turner Contemporary (2022), as well as performance of their live installation ‘3 Reflections²’ as part of FUTURERITUAL at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2022).
Instagram: @benjaminsebastian